Splunk AppDynamics Reviews

The root cause analysis they have is exceptional. It is a satisfying product, especially the smart agent collectors, which help us significantly. 

The real user monitoring and digital experience monitoring effectively track actual user experience with the applications, including page loading, interaction time for both desktop and mobile applications.

AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis in diagnosing performance issues is good. It doesn't have many false positives.

They have one aspect that needs improvement. They should combine the cloud and EPM on-premises together and provide a unified single pane of glass for all their modules because they currently have different modules for infrastructure monitoring. My expectation is to unify the management console into one single pane of glass console to manage everything and have all visibility from one place.

We have completed three years with Splunk AppDynamics.

It is good.

The scalability is fine. Many people are using it. We are a system integration company selling this to clients. Our clients are medium to large-sized businesses, typically ranging from 800 to 8,000 users.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

It's a bit complex; it's not exactly easy. It's moderate in difficulty. You need some experience to implement it.

It is a good solution. It has strong capabilities. You cannot compare Splunk AppDynamics with others. If you want quality, you need to pay, so the cost is justified.

I would recommend it for financial institutions and banks, as well as any companies that rely heavily on online applications, like e-commerce service providers.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

Our use case is in the lower environment. We are not using it in the production environment. We are part of the performance testing team, so we monitor the users on this server through performance testing, and during that time, we use all the agents, install them on the server, and monitor any bottlenecks. We use Splunk AppDynamics for deep dive analysis and provide inputs to the team. That is our use case.

We are using it only for the on-premises environment, but we are exploring options for Azure-hosted applications and AWS-hosted applications.

Splunk AppDynamics helps us in identifying bottlenecks and providing fine-tuning recommendations. We have many sites. We do deployments and analyze products. Before, as a performance testing team, we were not in a position to tell the team where the issue was happening, only able to provide numbers. With Splunk AppDynamics, we can pinpoint exactly where we need to concentrate and provide recommendations for fine-tuning. Without it, it was a nightmare. We wouldn't have been able to provide this information. 

The metrics browser is very useful, and the deep dive feature is very useful for us. 

Product-wise, everything is good, but the main concern is the extensions and their documentation, particularly for the installation of Azure app services. It is lacking some documentation, which is why we are always with the AppDynamics team for support to get the details.

Additionally, whenever they upgrade or add new features, we do not get notifications, which makes it very hard for us to find out new information. If they could fix this, it would be helpful, and our satisfaction score would increase.

We have been using Splunk AppDynamics for almost three years.

We are using the cloud version only and not an on-premises installation. I am not sure what to expect on the scalability front, but it is useful for us. We have tried it with a maximum of 500 concurrent users, and it provided all the required information.

Initially, we had some hiccups getting technical support. After some time, we got a contact, an account manager, to work directly with for technical support. He immediately finds a resource and assigns it to us.

Positive

We haven't done that exercise. We are working on a mix of applications, such as SaaS, AWS-hosted, Azure, and on-premises applications. It's very hard to find ROI because we are currently focused only on the on-premises applications. In a year, we work on about 20 projects, but we get only two or three projects using Splunk AppDynamics. For the others, because they are vendor-hosted, we don't utilize it. We are still trying it, and maybe once we develop that capability, we'll start finding ROI. Currently, we are not performing any exercise on calculating ROI.

We find its pricing reasonable and competitive. After it was acquired by Cisco, we found it acceptable.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics an eight out of ten.

We had several applications that were facing performance issues. To improve our observability, alerting, and monitoring of these performance problems, we onboarded the applications onto Splunk AppDynamics. This allowed us to gain better insights into the issues and identify the business transactions that were causing the problems.

I haven't used the APM feature. It's primarily been configuring database collectors on a database.

Splunk AppDynamics has been effective in auto-discovery and mapping and visualizing our application ecosystem. There have been instances where we've needed to fine-tune the auto discovery feature. When we installed it on Unix and Windows applications, it retrieved a substantial amount of information. We then had to configure the information to meet our specific needs. The tool goes out and summarizes all the business transactions, but we need to limit or filter out the excess data. This is particularly important for gaining visibility into application performance and proactively resolving issues.

Using Splunk AppDynamics for business transaction monitoring significantly impacts my ability to prioritize transactions such as logins or checkouts, and it has improved the process.

I've worked on an application where users book trades into a system. Each booking translates into a transaction. Similarly, users query these trades, which corresponds to other transactions. I can see the speed of these transactions and identify issues when trying to write them into the database. I can also monitor when transactions are being queried. Additionally, there are other applications accessing the database, and I can observe their interactions as well. Overall, it enhances my ability to visualize what’s happening behind the scenes.

I find Splunk AppDynamics' AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis to be very effective in diagnosing performance issues. I can quickly identify if there's any blocking on the database. Using the APM tool or the graphical user interface, I can track slow SQL queries. I can sort all those transactions to see which ones are consuming a lot of CPU and identify the long-running queries. This allows me to quickly assess the situation and understand what is going on.

Based on the issues we observe in Splunk AppDynamics, we know where to focus or where to spend money in improving the application. It gives us that flexibility to be able to improve and know where to focus our spending power.

I like the fact that you can self discover business transactions. It's easy to onboard your applications and configure your collectors or your agents.

The ability to monitor transactions and identify slow SQL queries in a database is valuable. We can detect issues such as blocking. It allows me to visually analyze the database's performance and understand its current state. Additionally, users can configure a dashboard to provide an overview of the database activities. 

When I onboard applications onto AppDynamics, I configure database agents or collectors to gather metrics and monitor business transactions. This setup enables me to see what is occurring within the database environment. I have extensive experience in configuring agents and collectors for databases, as well as for Windows and Unix machines.

I would probably suggest making the tool more real-time and allowing for integration with a wider range of DevOps tools. This is particularly relevant when comparing it to something like Genius, which I recognize is a different tool altogether. Ideally, I would prefer a situation where I don't have to use two or three different observability tools, allowing me to focus on just one.

When you self-discover observable business transactions, there should be a better way to focus on the specific transactions that matter to us. In our environment, we have numerous business transactions, but not all of them are relevant for monitoring. It would be helpful to easily identify and target the business transactions we want to concentrate on without it being too cumbersome.

I've been using Splunk AppDynamics for about three to four years.

It has gotten a lot more stable over the years in comparison to when I first started using it. I would rate it a seven out of ten for stability.

It's easily scalable. I would rate it a seven out of ten for stability.

There are approximately 100 global users in my organization who work with Splunk AppDynamics.

The technical support for Splunk AppDynamics deserves a solid eight out of ten.

It's down to the complexity of our environment. We've got a lot of legacy applications, so it is a little bit complex trying to implement it. We had about 200 machines or databases. It took some time to get it implemented. It took a couple of months.

From an end user's perspective, I often need to coordinate with my infrastructure team. Ideally, I would like to implement it without having to rely on them. For example, if I don’t have full access to a database, I have to reach out to my infrastructure team to gain full access or to create a collector on the database. It would be much more efficient if I could log into the database and create a collector myself. In my experience, having to wait for administrators with full access to take action slows down the implementation process.

The only maintenance I could think of is having to make sure that the accounts are onboarded and the password is reset because the password sometimes expires. That's the only issue. It's quite straightforward. Once you reset those passwords, you're good.

I estimate it saves 10% to 15% in various resources.

Genius is likely more intuitive and offers greater functionality. It can be easily integrated with many other DevOps tools. In comparison to AppDynamics, Genius provides much more flexibility. However, one downside of Genius is that it does not automatically discover business transactions. From that perspective, AppDynamics has an advantage due to its self-discovery feature for transactions.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics a seven out of ten.

I use Splunk AppDynamics as our monitoring tool, and it has been effectively used in the last five years to identify major issues and rectify them without causing a major impact to the website.

Splunk AppDynamics tells us what the top 10 queries are which are actually contributing to the load on the database, and it gives us the view of what exactly the query does, whether it uses more DB CPU or is contributing to the roll-up contention on the database. These details provide great insights, making it one of the good features from Splunk AppDynamics.

When it comes to the front end with my Node.js and React.js applications, it doesn't capture much of the details. The improvements I made were mainly around the Java agent side in our app layer, but it was lacking detailed information on the front-end layer. This is a disadvantage, and it could be improved from Splunk AppDynamics' perspective.

I have been working with this solution for the last five years.

It has a cost associated with it, but it is scalable only from a scalability perspective. It is scalable.

I have two different types of technologies used in my project. One of the projects was using a different monitoring tool called Dynatrace, a major competitor for Splunk AppDynamics. Discussions were going on whether I wanted to replace Splunk AppDynamics with Dynatrace, and a decision was made to replace Dynatrace with Splunk AppDynamics because of the capability it has with custom metrics and Java agents. However, discussions are now ongoing about potentially replacing Splunk AppDynamics with Dynatrace. I am using these two major tools in my ecosystem: Splunk AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

I monitor all the business transactions such as basket and add to basket via Splunk AppDynamics. I have set up and diagnosed those transactions.

For the others, they get captured as part of the catch-all transaction itself. In case I need them to be investigated, I use filters to identify the transaction specific to the particular BT.

I have not used auto-discovery as a tool such as analytics and the tracing, trace component, and diagnostic traces much. However, I use historical data to understand where exactly the issue is and try to rectify it.

I have not used the anomaly detection and root cause features.

I have not used troubleshooting as a feature.

Regarding Digital Experience Monitoring, I will lose the limit, causing licensing issues. I identified what pages and applications I don't want to monitor and removed them to cope with licensing. Going beyond the license means paying additionally.

I was not using the Secure Application feature.

Currently, I am not using an on-premises environment, so I cannot comment more on the on-premises side of things as I am using a cloud-based application in all areas.

My overall rating for Splunk AppDynamics is 9 out of 10.

My main use cases for Splunk AppDynamics include APM, application performance monitoring.

The features of Splunk AppDynamics that I appreciate most are the business processes. These features benefit my organization by providing a bigger picture, not only of their own systems, however, how it influences other parts of the environment and how we are being influenced by other parts. For its time, Splunk AppDynamics helped improve my organization's business resilience quite a bit.

To improve Splunk AppDynamics, it should migrate seamlessly into observability Splunk, which is called Splunk Observability Cloud.

I have been using Splunk AppDynamics for around 15 years.

The stability and reliability of Splunk AppDynamics were okay. I did not experience unusual downtime, crashes, or performance issues; no software is perfect, but it was within the expected parameters.

Splunk AppDynamics had some confusion about the SaaS, no SaaS, only SaaS strategy, which wasn't clear. Some time ago, they committed again to on-premises, however, it was too late.

I evaluate customer service and technical support as good, seven out of ten.

Positive

Prior to adopting Splunk AppDynamics, I was not using another solution to address similar needs; this was our first step into the APM world.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that it was very expensive.

Sadly, I did not see return on investment with Splunk AppDynamics.

The solution I was using prior was Grafana Cloud.

What caused me to stop using the solution is that we failed to bring the product to our DevOps teams so that they could easily use it and learn how to use it, this is something we had to learn again. I would advise other organizations considering Splunk AppDynamics to take a sharp look at the whole Splunk product portfolio and how they merge to observability cloud, integrating many AppDynamics features; this is very interesting, but I don't know whether or not they are already there.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Splunk AppDynamics seven out of ten.

The main use cases for it are similar to APM from Broadcom.

Splunk AppDynamics is very similar to APM. The part of the database is interesting since users can do many things with this dashboard, and the business dashboards are also very interesting. The main dashboard, showing all communication between components or business transactions, is very interesting as well.

This is similar to APM from Broadcom. The most important thing is managing the performance of the application for critical business in organizations, and it's very important to do this with the solution you want. If you don't have this kind of application, it's impossible to know what happened with your critical business.

It's similar to ABM from Broadcom. It's important to have. You need to be able to manage the performance of the applications that are critical for business in an organization. If you don't have this kind of application, it's impossible to know what's happening with your critical business aspects. 

With Splunk AppDynamics, the database part is interesting. Users can do many things with this dashboard, and the business dashboards are also very interesting. The main dashboard, showing all communication between components or business transactions, is very interesting as well. For example, the baseline of all metrics in the Splunk AppDynamics database is very interesting. It can send alarms or alerts when the database baseline is not correct.

The effectiveness of the Splunk AppDynamics auto-discovery and mapping is similar. It's maybe a little better than APM from Broadcom. However, it's not the best. Users need to modify or configure many things to get good information from discovery. It's good, yet there is something to improve.

Business transaction monitoring is the more interesting part of Splunk AppDynamics since it has automatic discovery of business transactions and many different kinds. For example, for web services or different kinds of components, such as in Java. Users can configure business sections in their environment, and it's possible for customers to configure different sources for the name of the class, the name of the method, or the name of the web service, which is very interesting.

I work with the AI-powered anomaly detection and root cause analysis for troubleshooting. Users can see the error and the message with the error on the dashboard, and they can see exactly what error they are encountering.

The user experience is good. Its impact is very high. It's crucial to be easy to manage for the customer's user experience.

The discovery is acceptable, however, users need to configure many things if they want good discovery. These points are candidates for improvement.

A good integration with the CMDB would be beneficial, so users can see a good view of the final services automatically. A good integration with Splunk would be very interesting, as Splunk is a good product for logs, and that part is currently missing in Splunk AppDynamics. If Cisco can achieve a solid integrated solution, it would be very beneficial.

I have used Splunk only for the security part, not with the APM part - only with the security and management of logs. I have used Splunk AppDynamics for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

We have had a good experience with Splunk AppDynamics compared to APM from Broadcom. AppDynamics if much more helpful.

Support is generally okay, and the support is knowledgeable. 

Positive

We have experience with another solution, with performance, with application performance, with infrastructure, alongside the other product we are working with.

It's very different. The most important aspect is that the discovery of Splunk AppDynamics is better than APM from Broadcom, along with the dashboard and many other features.

It's very complex regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Splunk AppDynamics. Normally, when we have to do a quote for a customer, we talk with Cisco, and it is very complex. For me, it is more complex than APM from Broadcom, which is easier. Cisco being complex depends on the part of the solution, the agent, and many things.

The solution is better in on-premises environments.

Splunk is only SaaS, and in two years, or when these solutions are integrated, maybe it will be a better SaaS solution. Right now, for on-premises environments, it's the best.

There is maintenance needed, and it's important to do the maintenance work. We have to do a lot of things to maintain it properly. It's not difficult. However, you do need to do a bit of work - more so than APM Broadcom.

Ten years ago, it was good, however, now it's complex in Cisco. We tried to integrate Splunk with Splunk AppDynamics, and maybe in the future, it will be a good solution. Right now, it's two separate solutions, and it's not a good integration.

Splunk AppDynamics' infrastructure monitoring is satisfactory. Users have a main dashboard with all information. If there is a problem with memory, CPU, or something else in a server, users get a red alert, and they can click on that component to see the specific metric related to that CPU, memory, or network problem, and the correlation is very good.

It optimizes the user experience for customers.

My experience is more from Java and .NET applications. I don't have security skills, however, customers find it acceptable to see this information in the global context regarding their applications.

It depends on the integration with Splunk that I mentioned before. I prefer to wait to see what happens with that, but Splunk AppDynamics is a very good solution, and I believe that integrating Splunk will yield excellent results.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate it a seven.

I am currently supporting Blue Yonder, where I implemented the Splunk AppDynamics solution for EY, Ernst & Young, and now I'm working with international companies, as you may be aware of Blue Yonder. I'm implementing Splunk AppDynamics for Blue Yonder, which has a variety of logistics and supply chain management applications to monitor, serving around 500 plus clients.

Predominantly, for this current project, we are using Application Performance Monitoring in Splunk AppDynamics, mainly for the Java instrumentations, as our application is completely based on Java, which helps to identify business transactions, bottlenecks, and also monitor database performance using custom queries.

I find the anomaly detection feature in Splunk AppDynamics quite good, as it was introduced about a year back, and we had enabled it.

Infrastructure monitoring in Splunk AppDynamics is really helping as it allows us to understand overall application performance and any bottlenecks, especially when we implement the machine agent alongside Application Performance Monitoring.

The main benefits from Splunk AppDynamics for my end users, mainly the application team, are that it helps identify bottlenecks proactively and allows for configuration of proper health rules to address issues before they affect customers.

I see that the main challenge with Splunk AppDynamics is the management of multiple agents, as installing several agents on a server is a significant hurdle we still face.

Functionality-wise, I would like to see more cognitive solutions in Splunk AppDynamics, ideally with a single agent that can implement policies and provide predictive insights regarding application performance degradation during peak times.

I have been working with Splunk AppDynamics for almost five to six years.

I rate the stability of Splunk AppDynamics an eight, as I have not faced many stability issues with the product.

Regarding scalability, I would also rate it an eight, as I have not encountered significant performance issues, especially being in a stable SaaS environment.

With our premium support contract for Splunk AppDynamics, we are very satisfied, receiving consistent support including bi-weekly calls with customer success managers and product specialists.

Currently, people are leaning toward Dynatrace, possibly due to its AI capabilities such as the Davis feature, which offer a single agent concept that is easier to implement and maintain.

For Splunk AppDynamics, the initial setup process I've encountered has been simple since I only increased the scope of what was already established four years ago, and while there is a challenge with multiple agent solutions, the product is generally beneficial.

We purchase Splunk AppDynamics through our vendor, HCL Technologies, as they handle all sales instead of direct from the vendor.

In my opinion, the main competitor to Splunk AppDynamics in the market is Dynatrace.

It is used as an APM. We utilize Splunk as a SIEM for security and infrastructure observability.

What I like the most about Splunk AppDynamics is the end-to-end observability for the application, along with traces. It enhances productivity and aids in cost avoidance.

Splunk AppDynamics is no longer available as a standalone product in the market. Cisco has integrated it into their full-stack observability solution called the Splunk Observability Cloud. Therefore, purchasing Splunk AppDynamics as a standalone product is no longer an option, which presents a challenge for us. After Cisco acquired Splunk in 2023, Splunk AppDynamics, initially a separate product, became part of Cisco's full-stack solution. This change means that I can no longer deploy it as before.

Splunk AppDynamics does not support the complete MELT framework, which includes metrics, events, logging, and tracing for the entire stack. It lacks maturity in correlation within the observability spectrum. Splunk AppDynamics provides an end-to-end view of the application but misses the infrastructure part, which is crucial.

I have used this solution for nearly six years, dating back to 2019.

It is quite stable. We have faced challenges with Splunk agents and Splunk AppDynamics agents. You often have multiple agents running simultaneously in the infrastructure. This can sometimes cause conflicts with your application, so it is necessary to conduct appropriate testing before deploying them in production to prevent potential outages.

We are facing issues at the moment with Splunk and scalability. We have reached maximum capacity in our tier, and extending capacity has not been cost-effective from Splunk's perspective.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I find the initial setup to be of medium to high complexity. It requires appropriate initial planning for the tools to be successfully implemented.

After implementation, it takes a little bit of time to realize its value.

We leveraged professional services from both Splunk and Cisco for the deployment of Splunk AppDynamics.

The pricing is quite comparable to similar solutions in the market. All these solutions at the moment are cheap, but it is like paying for insurance; you pay insurance to avoid major damage.

I would rate Splunk AppDynamics a seven out of ten. When addressing observability concerns, one should not only focus on the application layer. A full observability approach is required. New tools focus on the entire stack end-to-end, offering correlation to facilitate root cause analysis and minimize MTTR. Therefore, I would rate it a seven out of ten.